“For the longest time we’ve been placing these restrictions round the band, these boundaries,” Dave Grohl tells MOJO about Foo Fighters’ new album Concrete and Gold. “Not only in the recording process but also in the songs. Thinking, OK, we can’t go that far because we’ll never be able to reproduce that live. And this time, I thought – f**k it. Just f**k it. I said to Pat [Smear, guitar] and Taylor [Hawkins, drums] at one point, as we had stacked 32 vocals together, How the fuck are we gonna do this live? And Pat said, ‘Just do what Queen did – do the live version.’”
At his heart, there’s still a diamond-hard splinter of rock, implanted as a ten-11-year-old when he went to see the AC/DC movie, Let There Be Rock.
“The energy that the Foo Fighters try to give off is rooted in the night I saw that movie,” says Grohl. “Live performance should be all about that scene where Angus Young is offstage sucking an oxygen tank, soaking wet, basically in his underwear.”
